


Spit Blood, with Blue Steely Grey

by Veneredirimmel (Smilla)



Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Depiction of battlefields, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sex, Suicide, Suicide Attempt, Violence and slurs appropriate to the time, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-18
Updated: 2019-09-18
Packaged: 2020-10-21 04:21:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20687426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Smilla/pseuds/Veneredirimmel
Summary: He only wanted a fucking explanation. He wanted to knowwhy.





	Spit Blood, with Blue Steely Grey

A month after Finn was born, and a month after his father pulled his last disappearing act, Tommy’s mother started to take tablets that dried the milk in her breasts. 

She would spend her days in her nightgown, eyes vacant, murmuring words nobody could understand. She ignored her baby, ignored Ada’s round-eyed pleas for attention, carrying conversations only with unseen people that lived in the darker corners of the room, inside mirrors, in the flames of candles. Aunt Pol sighed and crossed herself and sometimes when her patience ran thin, she’d shout at her, but Tommy could see that his mom wasn’t listening. She wasn’t even with them anymore.

Finn didn’t understand what was happening, and he screamed all night his angry baby hunger and there was no calming him, no matter how much Tommy walked him up and down, up and down, from the fireplace to the front door, again and again. When it became clear that Tommy’s mom wouldn’t be able to feed Finn anymore, Aunt Pol talked with the oldest women in the street and they found a wet nurse, but the woman could only spare her milk once a day and the rest had to be done with cow’s milk that Finn spat out in sorrowful disgust. For a while, Tommy had been unsure Finn would make it, as he was too small and there was no baby fat on his bones. 

_Please, little brother,_ Tommy whispered inside his tiny ears.

*

“You have your orders, Sergeant.” And that’s all he said, Tommy’s Captain, sitting behind his makeshift desk, back ramrod straight on a kitchen chair that had been the property of some farm, of some farmer, a long time ago. Tommy could have killed him, right there on the spot, drawn his gun from where it sat strapped in its holster under his coat: a single shot, a single spent shell on the ground. A taken life worth the ones of the many that had just been condemned to death for the sake of a few fucking yards. It wouldn’t have been the first time, either, although he’d never done it on the scale of such a preventive measure.

He said instead, “There are no guarantees we’ll take the hill before hostilities cease.” He pointed with his cigarette at the grey telegram resting on top of the table. “It says it right there, _Sir_. The order could come anytime now.” 

The Captain stood up, drawing his considerable size straight, venom contorting his features into the kind of incredulity that someone like Tommy had dared questioning him. “I said, you have your orders.” Teeth serrated, he didn’t spit _you fucking tinker_, but Tommy heard it all the same.

Tommy flicked his cigarette in the general vicinity of his Captain’s feet and turned on his heels.

Outside the billet, in the grey night fog that never eased up, waited his corporal. Peter, wide-eyed, and not older than twenty-two under the soot the dirt and sleep deprivation. Peter offered him his own half-smoked cigarette and Tommy accepted it and took a long cleansing drag. He stared at the tip as it flared bright red before turning a dull orange in the damp air. They were made for durability, these ones, still burning even half wet and stale. His corporal breathed fast leaving puffs of vapour in the cold air, and he was standing rigid, strung tight with expectations and swallowed questions.

“Go find my brothers,” Tommy said. “Then gather the men as planned.” 

Peter froze, the way animals freeze when there is no way out. Tommy gave him a small push.

“Ahead we go, Peter. Ahead we go.” Tommy’s lips twisted around the words. “Look alive, kid.”

*

After the tunnel collapsed, everything had changed. They’d dug themselves out, Danny, Freddie and himself, furiously, stubbornly, determinedly. Until fresh air touched their faces and they’d laid there, breathing and weak and blind. After, there were hands all over Tommy’s body, under his armpits, clearing mud from his face and eyes from the inside his mouth and nostrils. Hands that had to kept him upright while his legs trailed behind him, uncooperative and useless appendages. The first thing Tommy had seen clearly was John’s face, older than he’d ever been, and he’d been coated in dirt too, head to toes, and for a moment Tommy had believed his baby brother was trapped with them and he’d forgotten, _he’d forgotten_ that Arthur was far away, on some Turkish beach, and John never dug tunnels with them and so he’d tried to scream at them to move, get away, _it’s coming down_ but a wall of viscid mud had come between them and hands a lot more forceful had to keep him down. 

The ghosts had come that same night, while he lay under John’s tarp, semi-drunk with some homemade distillate and opium and bromure, while all his muscles shook and trembled and seized. They came like wisps of smoke, twirling in the air, unsubstantial, vacant in the eyes, and Tommy had had to bite his fist to keep himself from screaming because he knew that if he started, he’d never stop.

He’d drawn blood so the pain grounded him back from this dream, but the ghosts had come to stay.

*

John joined him under the stump of a tree close to the treeline. It was a good spot to sit and smoke and sit and listen to the shells from the mortars sing their deathly song somewhere not far away. At this time in the early morning, the sound was sporadic, nothing like the furious shower of the battle, more the kind of lone explosions followed by the lighter rat-ta-ta of the gun machines. The noise travelled faster through the flat earth than in the heavy foggy air, made it vibrate under his feet, and it never eased up.

Sky was clearing some eastward, turning the fog into a milky white wall, and visibility was no more than ten yards that day, worse than it had been in the previous weeks. It was, as defined by their officers, a favorable weather condition. Truth was that it’d give them cover but they would also go in blind themselves. The only real advantage they had was that the Fritz wouldn’t expect a massive attack when an armistice was so close to being signed.

It was all so fucking useless. What Tommy saw in those few yards were more corpses, what his Captain saw was his last chance at medals and field promotions.

He should have killed him when he had the chance.

“Is it true, Tom? The men say it’s over, that it’s only a matter of hours before it’s a done deal.”

“Where’s Arthur?” 

They weren’t going to see the sun today. Not that it’d matter, it wouldn’t help the dampness that seeped into everything, straight to chilled-bones through all his layers, but Tommy had embraced it, and it didn’t bother him anymore. It never really had gone away, anyway, since the tunnel. It was a state of being, this being never quite dry, as the soiled clothes, and boots weighted with mud, and the filthy crusted everywhere on his skin. It was a state of being like the incessant buzz of flies over dead corpses and the rats-infested everything.

“Saw him near the latrines, said he was going to get drunk, but only after he’d taken a shit. You ask me, he was drunk already.”

Tommy didn’t smile back at John, and he saw John’s face fall a bit, recompose itself in an all-business expression. He tried to calculate how risky it would be to keep Arthur out of the battle, leaving him unconscious in some dilapidated billet somewhere until this one last battle would be done, hope no one of the officers would notice, shoot them all dead if they’d make a fuss about it.

“The men say we have orders to attack, too, Tommy.”

“Yes, John, that’s right. We proceed as planned.” He stood up, took a step in the direction of the battlefield, then he turned around. “Look out for Arthur, eh?”

*

After he got shot, they sent him to a hospital in the French countryside. NCOs had their own separate ward and tarps hanging between beds. More light and better accommodation than the saps had but a step lower than the luxury afforded to officers. Tommy’s own bed was close to a window and he could look outside at the blooming garden and at the trees and he blamed his fever and the infection if some of the patients walking outside looked like his old comrades from the 179th. But they were dead. _They were all dead._

Even when their hands trailed upon the glass panels at his window and asked him why he didn’t save them, they were still dead.

By the third day, the infection that had left him sleepless and restless and sweaty broke and his head wasn’t as clouded anymore; in sharp relief came the moans from the soldiers from deep in the bowels of the hospital, and sometimes, at night, a lone shrill scream that sounded like hell itself had broken loose and the devil was dragging someone straight back into it. 

A Captain came by his bedside, at some point during his stay, gave him a letter with the King’s sigil. This one medal came with money. Tommy shook his hand and told him to send the money to his aunt back in Birmingham, no, not his father, his aunt, thank you, sir.

He let the night nurse, Nicolette, make love to him that night, let her ride his cock while his shoulder shot white-hot spikes down his sides and back, drank her _chéri_ and _mon amour_ with his eyes closed, like they were promises.

A day before he went back to the front, she brought him a tiny jar of homemade jam made by her mother, cigarettes, paper, a pen. Tommy kissed her soft lips then sat under a tree in the garden and wrote a letter. The ghosts crowded around him to peek from above his shoulders, thieves all of them for a life that wasn’t theirs anymore.

He wrote.

_Dear Aunt Pol, I killed many men, and I didn’t care for a single life I have taken._

_Dear Aunt Pol, I wish I never volunteered._

_Polly, I miss you. I miss Ada, I miss Finn._

In the end, he wrote.

_Dear Aunt Pol,  
There will be some extra money coming soon. Don’t worry yourself sick about Arthur and John. I’m looking out for them._

But he didn’t send that letter either.

* 

She would have entire conversations with her ghosts, Tommy’s mother. 

Aunt Pol ordered him to throw all the tablets away and hide the alcohol, and try to get her to eat the rich kitchen broth she’d made because she was turning into a ghost herself, she’d become so thin. It didn’t go the way Pol planned, or Tommy had hoped. She threw the plate on the floor as soon as Tommy put it in front of her and that made him angry because they couldn’t afford to waste a single shilling, not with so many bellies to fill. They could not. 

When she couldn’t find her pills, she started shouting, then thrashing when Tommy tried to stop her because Ada was crying and Finn wailing from inside his crib. She was bone-thin and frail but one of her uncoordinated fist hit Tommy’s lips, filled his mouth with blood and his eyes with hot tears. When she got loose, she stormed out still only clothed in her nightgown.

Tommy spent the night looking for her, from Garrison Lane to Bordesley Green, then up to Victoria Park, hoping she’d not gone there, because it was dark and she was out of her mind and alone, and a woman wearing a thin nightgown in a cold mid-November. He went back home empty-handed and hating himself because he was furious at what she was doing. 

He found her kneeling in front of the Black Madonna Pol had bought at the fair the previous summer, furiously spinning rosary beads between her fingers. Aunt Pol was sitting with Ada on her lap and Finn was blessedly silent. 

“Women get like this sometimes, after giving birth, Tommy. But it goes away the same way it came.”

“Maybe if Dad came back--”

Pol’s eyes became hard in her pretty face, making her look older than she really was. “I have taught you better than this, Thomas. Lying to yourself is not going to help.”

*

Since spring that year, they’d abandoned the trenches, swallowing land across Flanders Fields as fast as they lost it. From this close, it looked to Tommy like the usual stalemate of the past five years: a few more yards painfully taken, redoubts and low hills conquered today that went lost the following week. They’d been in Ypres three times, now, and someone should have noticed the inutility of it all a long time ago. From where Tommy was standing, it felt like the only difference was that they slept each night in a different place: destroyed farms, abandoned houses in empty villages, roof-less churches. 

They also attacked during the day, now, but always under the same heavy cover of shells and machine guns, and the answering fire from the enemy. It was a never-ending cycle of wading through a wasteland littered with craters, trailed with dead corpses; on the side, fields of makeshift crosses, helmets on top.

At seven, they gathered in a circle around their officers, Tommy, by choice, stood among his men. There was a different buzz that morning, heavy with looks Tommy felt all over his own skin, murmurs that pleaded with him to stop all of this. Words must have spread that the Armistice was close to being signed, that it was only a matter of hours.

Tommy met Arthur’s eyes, then John’s, on the other side of the circle, but he had nothing to tell them so he the only thing he could do was willing them both to survive. 

Peter shifted back and forth beside him in an anxious dance.

“It would be bloody unlucky of me to die today, eh, sir?”

*

They were south of Passchendaele when sapper Dayan killed one of his comrades. They’d been back from the front for three days, and not yet used to the different routine, bodies became confused to the longer hours of sleep afforded to them, to the lack of imminent danger. Tommy’s men were in a queue for their grub, waving like grass in the wind, and a single stray shell had exploded outside the trench, no danger in it, not close enough to disrupt the line of men filling metal plates with the blob-like pudding of Sundays. A lucky shot, the shell sprayed them with some dirt, and some of the youngest sappers laughed while they tried to save their meal from being covered in it. Tommy was last in line, behind Dayan, but he didn’t see him drop his own still empty plate, and he didn’t see him take the rifle strapped to his back, embrace it, point, and shoot point-blank at the back of the man in front of him. He was busy, standing frozen at the exploded shell himself, noticing how the soil made a fine black powder-like rain that when landed on the skin was similar to splatters of blood. 

Shouts and screams brought him back, and instinct made him tackle Dayan to the ground before he’d even realized what was going on. The rifle trapped between them, the barrel so hot it burned Tommy’s cheek, and from this close, Tommy could see that the sap had gone somewhere else, in that scary place where so many soldiers went sometimes, where Tommy himself had just been, though he’d always been careful to come back. He started talking to him, like to a spooked horse, shushing noises in his ears, stopping his thrashing with arms and legs. Out of the corner of his eyes, the lifeless body of the private Dayan had shot laid in a puddle of blood. He was dead and Tommy couldn’t remember his name.

Be quiet,he said. _It’s all right._ Over and over, until Dayan went limp with sobs.

Later, the military police came to take the man into custody and Tommy ordered his men to dig a grave for their dead comrade.

In the morning, they found that Dayan had hung himself in his cell with his own belt, and nobody was willing, or cared enough, to make sure that it hadn’t been possible for him to do it alone. 

That night the group of ghosts that lingered on the edges of the trenches had gained two more faces in it. Sad long faces with sharp eyes, watching all his moves. Tommy didn’t even look their way.

*

Early on, they used to bring canaries into the tunnels. Yellow, chirping canaries that were kept in cages for testing the air. They brought them into the dark tunnels and when they hit gas they died: they didn’t even make a noise, they simply stopped chirping cheerfully, just like that, and, with a flutter of wings, fell on the bottom of their cages, neck bent and body loose. They didn’t die badly, as horses did, but like the horses, their ghosts had more sense than to linger around, after death.

It worried Tommy that soldiers had so little good sense they didn’t even leave when they could. He could taste the questions on his tongue, the acid in them when he swallowed them whole. Did they even have a choice? They weren’t even the same men Tommy remembered from when they were alive, and he was afraid, chills-down-his-spine afraid, that if he acknowledged them, they would never go away, they’d drag him into their madness with them. 

He smoked, drank, laid on his pallet. Bum-crash-bum of shells and ra-ta-ta of machine guns. A full minute of silence. Whispers coming from the ghosts all amassed around his cot.

He waited for the light of day to come. Did _he_ have a choice?

*

They attacked an hour before the telegram announcing the armistice reached their command. Tommy moved his men silently into the fog, and walking into the quagmire was more like swimming against the current, but they’d gotten used to how heavy boots became with mud, and they reached their position on time waiting for their signal. Single mortar shell at eight o’clock.

Marching, silent as ghosts in the heavy fog.

sibilant shells approaching then explosions

closer still, guttural screams, shouts, some lone desperate rifle shot, aimless.

more a reflex.

Up to the hill. _Move left_ shouted at his flank. Hoping they heard him under the heavy noise - eyes on Arthur on the other side._ Down, now!_ under the barrage of a disorganized offensive fire - or was it defensive? Mud flying, scraping his face. Head deep into the earth he breathed through it, ate some, swallowed, spat. Then up and running, over the defensive shallow trench. Over craters, dead bodies, lost limbs, over squelching mud and equally slippery blood. Over shouted orders and screams of agony. Killing. _Killing_. And killing some more. Sweeping away, like the unarresting tide, everyone they came across.

Movement on the left and he shot. A gray-clothed arm on his right but too close for his rifle, reacting by instinct, elbows, fists, kicks, his enemy fighting as hard to survive. He lost his footing in that deadly embrace, headlocked with another body, tumbled down on a drop - a crater, a dug-hole, he couldn’t say didn’t care to find out - but the sky became the floor, white smoky sky, and the ceiling was soft brown earth. They came to a stop on a Trojan Horse and Tommy felt one of the spikes tear its way into his flank and lodge itself deeply inside, felt it get through clothes, skin, muscles. Didn’t feel the pain, but he screamed and he screamed, voice muffled inside the jacket of a German soldier, breathing the rancid smell of his sweaty fear, no air in, he couldn’t breathe. He was under, underground: _he only wanted to see the sky_. He pushed at the body on top of him to dislodge himself. Blood warmed his side. Blood fell into his eyes, but it wasn’t his own. The soldier he’d been fighting was nailed against the Trojan Horses in three points, eyes wide open, dead. Tommy stared at him, wondered briefly what kind of animal would do that to another human being.

When he finally stood up, the battle had quieted around him. He looked at how men had turned the land into a hellish landscape. He coughed in the smoke hanging heavy and acrid, and low, felt the first pang of pain in his side, muted like it was happening somewhere else, inside someone else’s body. He counted men and ghosts alike, and those he didn’t find in a group, he found in the other, and he hoped he wasn’t confusing the two. He couldn’t find his corporal in either. His brothers.

As if on cue, Arthur shouted from somewhere deep inside the foggy smoke, “Oi, Tommy!” Urgent but not yet panicked. 

Tommy formed the answer with his lips but it took a couple of tries to force his voice out. “John?”

Arthur laughed, clipped and loose. “Listen.”

Deep ahead where the last remnant of the battle was being fought, a gun machine was rattling sporadically, merrily. _John._ At eleven, they’d secured the redoubt. From the top of the hill that they had conquered, the land was nothing more than a graveyard.

He nodded, felt blood seeping into his clothes, trailing down his leg and soaking his leggings. Some of the ghosts sniffled his wound like hounds. He ignored them, found his pocket watch miraculously intact. His first step was a gamble he won, so he took another, and another and rounded his men, and ordered them around and he pointed to the wounded when the medics came and when he found Peter, he fell to the ground and tried to keep the boy’s brain inside his skull. Peter didn’t die, but later, after Tommy had passed out due to the blood he’d lost from the wound on his side, only later, after they’d sewn him up like one of Ada’s rag doll while Arthur kept him still and shushed nonsense in his ears in that deep heavy brogue of his that drowned his own screams, only later the doctors told him his corporal would never talk properly again. 

That night, when the reality of the ended war had settled like a thick veil on his men and all the encampment, and over the silent guns, and the cold mortars, and above the fields of crosses on the sides of the roads, Tommy drank a toast to Peter. What would he need words for anyway.

*

Pol was wrong. Whatever was happening to his mother, it didn’t go away. By the time Christmas had come she didn’t even answer to her own name when someone was calling her, lost in whatever world only she could see. 

One night, Tommy came back to a candle-lit kitchen and three women sitting around the table, his mom on the remaining side. It took him a moment to make sense of what he was seeing, a moment to wonder how much she’d spent on that many candles covering all the flat surfaces. There was some low murmuring like a chanting coming from the table and the people sitting at it and she was chanting too, the only one who didn’t open her eyes when he came inside, the only one who was really lost in whatever the fuck they were doing. Angry, he slammed the door shut, closing outside the noise from the street and the rain and the ever-constant thump-thump of the factories so that he could only hear the mad thumping of his own heart.

Methodically, with as much deliberation he could muster he started blowing each candle out. She could have set the house on fire, she’d probably blown all their money out, too, with that many candles they didn’t need. His breath came short, chopped, strangled in his throat. “Get out,” he managed to say. “All of you.” And he pushed the women out of the house, regretting they were not men he could beat to a pulp in the middle of his own fucking kitchen. 

His mom realized what was happening and she stood up, made the candles on the table fall over and luckily they drowned in their own melted wax. She shouted something at him, but it was a fleeting spurt of strength before it deserted her and she fell back on her chair, sobbing into the crook of her own arms. Tommy was already up the stairs, though, suddenly aware that he had seen neither Ada nor Finn.

He found them in his own room, sleeping under the duvet, Finn in the circle of Ada’s arms, her face still wet with tears.

Downstairs, his mother was talking through the tears, carrying on a one-sided conversation in wet, sobbed words.

*

The silence didn’t come at once, or maybe Tommy didn’t notice until it was too late to ease himself into it. He’d been distracted, avoiding rioting when it’d become clear that being shipped back home would take too bloody long for men that were already dreaming themselves back into their houses, walking in their familiar streets, drinking in pubs, fucking wives and whores. Most of all, though, he’d been busy telling officers to fuck off whenever some of them complained about too loose discipline and untucked shirts and loose belts. _You’ll be happy they don’t strangle each one of you during the night,_ he’d told his freshly-promoted Major, earlier that day.

And he’d been worried, for Arthur, who’d gone on a toot of alcohol and fighting that had yet to end. He’d been worried, for John, whose wife back home had been sick with influenza as of Pol’s last letter, a month before. That morning, he’d put John’s papers on top of the pile ready to be signed. That was dealt with at least, he’d tell John that night.

So he’d had no time to notice, and it hit him, just like that, when he was watching an improvised game of football set right in the middle of what had been no-man’s-land only a few days before. The men had levelled the battlefield as best as they could with shovels and delimited a makeshift football field using ropes. They didn’t have a proper ball, but they had found a cabbage head they repurposed for the occasion; it lost bits and pieces every time they kicked it. 

He was sitting and smoking and watching each player fall and slip with abandon into the mud and raise big lumps of it whenever they hit the cabbage-ball and he realized all at once that he could hear their voices. Some high-pitched, some low and rumbling, raucous shouts and shrill protests, a half-hearted fistfight starting over the goal door at the far end that ended in loud laughter. He could recognize the accents too, all of them. Hard consonants from the Wops, the lilt from the Paddies, Cockneys and Winchester's Own God’s Country. Welsh, Scottish. Brummies. All mixed with the occasional French and Dutch. All distinctly recognizable as if the end of the war had lifted a veil off them and remade each of them, real people. The high-pitched shrill of the referee’s whistle made him jump.

Birds were singing. Wind was running through leafless tree-trunks, mournful when it went through the fields of crosses. 

Not a gunshot, not a scream. Not the growing whine of the shells approaching before they hit the ground with a booming explosion. Emptiness.

That’s when he turned to the ghosts sitting around him, pointed his cigarette at them, and asked, _Now, what?_

Knew right there, it’d been a mistake.

*

They’d been in a cave under La Boisselle, one of the many the 179th was digging in the spring of 1916, well into a seventy-two-hour turn of surveillance. It was insanity being so far out there, not enough space to stand straight, not enough air to breathe or light to see. Trapped under tons and tons of earth like moving corpses, above them Schwabenhöhe and the German soldiers eating and drinking, shitting, sleeping, writing letters to their beloved, being afraid to die. Digging tunnels like they were, listening, moving quietly, filling chambers with explosives so they could trap each other like mouses in a hole.

Tommy crouched against the blind cul-de-sac of the tunnel, listening, all his reality reduced to the faint noises coming from the other side, the cracking sounds of the earth settling, the whine of the planks they used to make the tunnels safe, like a constant death threat. The geophone dug inside his ear, and his arm and fingers were cramped. The rest of his body in a fit of spite had gone completely numb and Tommy felt as if he was reduced to the faint noises he tried to hear and when he closed his eyes he had a hard time remembering if he was really still alive.

A loud screeching noise came inside his ear, magnified by the geophone, and he tensed and let it drop and his hand went to his rifle, laying by his side, but when he turned Danny was smiling and Freddie was giving him his back, intent on doing something against the wall of the cave.

“Fuck, Freddie, cut it out.”

But Freddie didn’t stop, didn’t even acknowledge him and Tommy let himself fall on the ground, just for a minute. He thought, _A minute is all it takes._ And he found he didn’t care as much as he should, even fantasized a moment about finally being done, over and done with.

“We haven’t heard a noise coming in days, Tommy, relax.”

Tommy didn’t answer, crouched on the ground for a few minutes, breathed in, but air was stuffy and heavy and didn’t get all the way down, leaving him starved, clammy, wanting. Finally, Freddie sat back on his haunches and Tommy could see what it was that he was doing. Freddie had that shit-eating grin on his face, all teeth and a smirk, the one he wore when he thought that he’d been clever and smart and that had started to wear thin on Tommy sometime in the first month of the war. 

“Come here, Tom,” Freddie said. Danny giggled nervously and Tommy stared at him for a moment. Even in the dim light of the cave, he could see his eyes were showing a bit more of white that they should but he looked to be holding up for the moment. 

He looked at the wall: three crosses, three badly drawn but unmistakable gravestones in a single line, their respective initials marked under each one. Tommy’s was in the middle. Under it, clear enough to read in the dim light of the oil lamp, crudely written, ‘IN MEMORY’.

Curly would say it was bad luck, tempting fortune like that. Curly, who was the smartest of them all, would be damn right. But neither Freddie nor Danny knew the dangers of what Freddie had done, not in the ways Tommy did, by instinct, by his own blood surging in fury. He wanted to hit Freddie and wipe that shit-eating smile off his face, but he lay there, staring at the cross with his name on it.

*** 

Two weeks after the Armistice had been signed, he sent John and Arthur back home. It took two men to drag Arthur’s sorry, drunk ass to the cattle wagon that would bring them to the train back to England, and all the way through to there. John walked beside him, gave him the kind of sideways looks of someone who wanted to ask something but couldn’t quite find the words, or the courage, for it. Tommy wondered when exactly John had started walking on eggshells around him, where, in their long journey back home, something had shifted and was never going to be back to its rightful place. 

Tommy considered asking John what he wanted to say, but words lodged themselves deep inside his chest. They were all still stuck in the mud, somehow. He stared ahead, instead, crowded with ghosts all around, front and back and between himself and John. Icy fingers and empty eyes and only when John was up on the wagon, Arthur’s head propped on his shoulder, he trusted himself to speak.

“Tell Aunt Pol and Ada I’ll be back home soon.”

John didn’t say anything, just nodded, and Tommy stood there until the cattle wagon left and the horses carried it away along the dirty road with its load of men and he stopped following it only when he couldn’t distinguish John’s face from the rest of the soldiers anymore.

_You think you can leave?_ asked one of the ghosts, someone Tommy didn’t recognize anymore, and noise suddenly exploded inside his ears, bombs, gunshots, the whistles of the shells coming closer with their whiny laments of death right before exploding, and he couldn’t see, he couldn’t see anything but black, black smoke and black dark earth and he couldn’t feel but viscid wet soil between his fingers, inside his nostrils, on his tongue, stealing his breath. He stood still, waiting for it to pass, part of his brain aware it wasn’t real, the rest busy with the effort to keep his lips sealed so he didn’t start screaming in the middle of a dirty road. They’d send him straight into an Asylum, to the special branch of the field hospital, where men like him couldn’t stop shouting. 

No. They’d shoot him in the head like the mad horse he was.

Slowly so very slowly, he founds his bearing again, the road under his feet and the cold wind brushing against his sweaty skin. The noise reduced to a low hum deep down, like a coil of smoke or fog, trailing behind his feet, like _silence_ ready to swallow him whole.

*

She’d fucking used their father’s gun. 

Left a pool of blood all over the kitchen table and the floor. It was Tommy who found her, startled awake by the loud noise. And all the way downstairs, in that mad tumble, all he could think was that he _knew_ what had happened, and it was over, wasn’t it? 

Seeing her, finally, all he could think of was how diminished she looked in death, obscenely exposed in the harsh light of morning: white nightgown, brown hair, a partially open eye but no blue visible anymore. The red of her blood, the smell of it. Tommy stood there for a while, staring at nothing and everything, knowing he’d forget how soft her smiles were and fierce her temper, and that this one would be the only memory that would last, that would lodge itself forever in his brain painted in bright, red blood.

He blocked the view from Ada when she ran downstairs, she too awoken by the noise, held her against his shoulder and his shirt soaked her tears and hiccups.

She’d fucking used their father’s gun.

_Make it stop,_ she’d asked him the night before.

*

He only wanted a fucking explanation. He wanted to know _why_. Why the blood (on the table, on the floor, flowing like a river and soaking the earth). Why the cold (her cold, frozen stare, the young rigid bodies, and worms-filled eye cavities). Why the noise (Ada’s scream and Finn’s wailing, and shells falling with a heavy thunder of death). 

But most of all he wanted to know why this silence now. All over the fields and inside his brain, like empty land covered in fog and frozen with it. 

He tried asking the ghost at his left, but it had his father’s face and a smoking gun in his hand. He took the bottle to his lips, but a gun was there instead, cocked and ready to fire and it looked so easy, right?, so easy, _and right_, that he had to try. Know how it’d feel against his skin, cold and hard, against his temple, know if it’d bring dark, quiet, _peace_ at last.

Did it bring peace to her? 

Using her own husband’s gun didn’t feel like peace, it felt like fire and brimstone and hell raining on them.

Ravenous eyes followed his movements, starved skeletons, not really men anymore, rattling bones buried in the mud along their trail. A cold finger trailed his cheek and he felt it, the hard knob of bones, his own tears. Do it, they said, all at once, come to us, they said. And it was the warm womb of the tunnels beckoning him now, with its soft soil and Freddie’s crude drawing on the wall. His mother’s warm embrace.

His finger trembled against the trigger, he closed his eyes. 

A deep breath-

* 

Two days after Arthur and John had left, Tommy tore down the insignia from his uniform and threw them into a bonfire by the edge of the encampment. He took a bottle of whatever passed around for alcohol in those godforsaken lands and took a long swallow in a silent toast. _To France,_ he thought, _to our gambled off lives_. From then on, it would be his own to give away.

Then, he started walking toward the cattle wagons that took men back home. He cut right through the encampment and his soldiers stopped in their tracks and stared at him, but nobody asked what the fuck he was doing, and nobody stopped him.

They parted to let him pass; like the fucking red sea, they parted. He walked between two wings of pale and dirty faces. Someone clapped his shoulder. Another said, _Thank you Sergeant Major_. Spine straight in his rag-tag uniform. From somewhere an older man gave him a blessing, but it wasn’t a blessing he needed, a damning would have been more welcome, a damning was what he needed. He walked away, slowly and deliberately, and he left a trail of fog behind him, chilled and white, that swallowed his following of ghosts and took them back into the earth, where they belonged. He sent all that was soft and kind with them, where it belonged.

He left. The weight of his Webley comfortable at his side, chamber full; all bullets unspent. 

\--

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this story a few months back, inspired by all those hints in the show that Tommy sometimes, goes into that liminal space between life and death, combined with Steven Knight saying that he'd always imagined that Tommy put a gun to his head at the end of the war (a quote I have now displaced), only to decide that no, he would live from then on, by his own rules.  
When series 5 started to air I could not believe to my own eyes :D
> 
> A lot of thanks go to [Deadendtracks](https://archiveofourown.org/users/amonitrate/pseuds/deadendtracks), for her relentless trust in my writing (and for her red pen).  
As usual mistakes are all mine, and mine alone.
> 
> _Cold as it Gets_ by Patty Griffin has been sort of the unofficial soundtrack while I was writing. I reccommend both the song and the artist.


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